A Failed Guardian
by dilly2
Summary: The loss of his lover nearly drives Tseng mad with guilt. Anything else would be a spoiler to those who haven't gotten this far in the game. Angst in the highest degree. (Includes Rufus, Reno and Tseng) Please R&R.


The following contains very disturbing imagery. You are warned.  
  
  
**A Failed Guardian**  
_by dilly_  
  
  
An explosion shook Shinra headquarters. Tseng ran up the stairs, swiping his keycard and punching in the emergency code to open the locked doors on every level. He passed more than one injured person. He couldn't stop. Not for one second. That second might save the President's life.

Rufus's office was nearly obliterated. The beams whined and shrieked, threatening to break at any moment. He plowed through the rubble, searching.

A hand.

Not quite a hand. A palm with two slender fingers and three stubs. He removed the debris around it. There was no arm. His insides went icy cold.

"Rufus!" he screamed. There was no answer. He hadn't expected one. He searched desperately. Under the remnants of what used to be a desk, the pitiful body lay.

Tseng looked down at the corpse. Mangled nearly beyond recognition. One arm gone, the other incomplete. The right leg twisted the wrong way, the other hanging onto his body by little more than a tendon.

But the face.

The face was untouched. The eyes open wide with no more damage than a few specks of dust on the iris.

Tseng kneeled down slowly, deliberately. "Rufus?" He ran his hand along the cheek of his President, his sometimes friend, his sometimes lover. He gathered the body in his arms and held it close.

"You'll be okay," he whispered, rocking his blond angel back and forth. "I won't let anything hurt you. I'll protect you."

The blood was soaking through his suit. He could feel the warm wetness of it on his skin.

"Tseng!"

He gasped and looked down at Rufus, thinking for a moment that it was he who had spoken. A shake on his shoulder proved him wrong. Reno stood over him.

"This part of the building is going to collapse. You have to leave." Finally, the red haired Turk noticed what Tseng was holding in his arms. "Oh gods. Oh gods, Tseng. Th-there's nothing you can do. If you stay here, you'll die too."

"Then, I'll die!" he snapped, holding his treasure closer. "I have to stay with him. He doesn't feel well."

Reno stared down at Tseng. Seeing his powerful, stoic boss in this state was nearly more than even he could bare. That, and the bits and pieces of the President of Shinra staring up at him over Tseng's shoulder. "We'll take him with us. Take him to a hospital. He'll be okay if we get him off this floor."

Tseng took a deep, shaky breath and nodded firmly, regaining some of his dignity. He cradled Rufus in his arms and followed Reno, mindlessly, out of Shinra Headquarters.

***

He sat, blank-faced next to the bed. Only his eyes betrayed him. They had covered Rufus's body up with a sheet and closed his bright blue eyes. He wanted to hold his lover's cold hand, but they remained in the rubble.

He leaned forward slowly and brushed away the matted hair, once so soft to the touch, away from the President's forehead and kissed it. It was like kissing plastic.

Reno stood in the doorway.

"Mind if I come in?"

Tseng shook his head negatively. Reno stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He walked slowly to Tseng's side and looked down at the body under the sheet.

"Are you okay?"

Tseng laughed mirthlessly. "What does it matter? It's over. Everything."

"Not everything. You're still alive."

"He's not."

A long silence stretched between them. Finally, Reno broke it.

"I sort of understand how you feel, you know?"

Tseng looked up at him, moving only his eyes. Morose and dubious, but not hateful.

"My best friend died in a Mako Reactor explosion." He sighed. "He... didn't look as bad as this, but he was younger than me, you know. I kind of felt like his big brother. Like it was my job to take care of him. And then, there he was, dead. I was only a few meters away from where he was. I lived and he died."

Tseng turned his head towards Reno a moment, then shifted his focus back to Rufus. He ran his hand through the dirty blond hair.

"We should clean him. He wouldn't want to be buried looking like this. His hair. It's very important to him."

Reno nodded, keeping worried eyes on Tseng. He knew far too well that survivors suffer more than fatalities. "We can put him in his favorite outfit. The white suit that he wore to the banquet."

"He looks nice in that suit," Tseng said quietly.

"Tseng... do you want to talk about this?"

The dark man turned his head sharply to Reno. His eyes looked strange. Almost angry, but not quite.

"I love him," he said firmly.

"I know."

"I wonder." His voice was a raspy whisper. "I wonder what he thought about. He must have seen the ray coming at him. He must have known he was going to die. What did he think about?"

Reno placed a hand on Tseng's shoulder awkwardly. "I'm... sure he thought about you."

"Are you? I'm not. I'm quite sure he didn't."

"Don't do this to yourself, Tseng," Reno said, as gently as he could manage, "There's no way of knowing. There's no point in torturing yourself."

"Do you even care? He's been dead for a day. You act as though I'm supposed to be _over_ it. You act as though you already _are_ . He was the man we we're sworn to protect and we failed. Now look at him!" He jumped out of his chair and pulled the sheet off of Rufus's lacerated body. "This is our fault, Reno. This is our doing."

"It's the Diamond Weapon's doing. It's the debris's doing. We couldn't have stopped it from happening."

He stood straight, stiff and trembling for a moment. Then, his chin fell to his chest. Hands turned to fists. "Everything is gone." He took a shuddering breath. A tear fell from his eye. Then, another. "Everything I lived for was taken from me in a moment. The company I work for. The President I honored and respected. The man I loved. It's _gone_, Reno. It was all _him_ and it's gone."

"Then," Reno said quietly, "You'll have to start again."

He shook his head slowly. "I'm tired. I'm too tired. I'm too old."

"You're forty-two, not eighty. You have plenty of life ahead of you."

"What is that life worth?" He walked over to the side of the bed and put his hand around the arm that remained. "I miss his hands." His strong voice wavered, became small. He had energy left to fight off the sobs. He bowed his head low and his shoulders shook. Reno went to him cautiously, afraid to make the wrong move, and put his arm around the big man. All at once, Tseng fell to his knees. Reno let himself fall with him. He held fast as the dark man wept.

"Maybe it doesn't mean much to you now, but you are the best person I know. The world wouldn't be worth anything if you gave up on living."

Tseng looked up at Reno, his eyes burning red, his nose swollen. "It does matter," he said between little shuddering gasps.

He couldn't manage any more words. Reno pushed Tseng's head down onto his small shoulder. He accepted Reno's offer and stayed with him for hours, until he had sobbed himself dry.

Reno led his now former boss to his room and tucked him into bed, promising that the next day would be better. Tseng didn't have the strength to answer verbally, so he simply nodded. Reno sat by his side until he began to snore lightly.

The red haired man left Tseng, sleeping soundly. He returned to the other one, sleeping even more soundly and pulled him off of the bed, careful not to let the remaining leg loose itself further. He wrapped the body up in its sheet and carried it down the hall to the bath.

He put the corpse in the warm water and leaned it against the side.

It took three hours of scrubbing, but he washed every bit of dust and blood out of the President's hair. 


End file.
